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Thursday, May 22, 2008

What's eating my garden??!

Grrr! Something's been nibbling in my garden - any ideas as to what it is and what I can do about it??! It's mostly my cauliflower, broccoli and *sob* pak choy..

Also can anyone identify this plant?? It came in a pot of tomato plants I got at the last LETS picnic and has been quite happily growing ever since. More than likely it's a weed if I'm managing to grow it well :)

8 comments:

Kez, looks like a classic case of cabbage moth to me. The come in and lay eggs on the back of the leaves. They're tiny whitish specks that spawn lots of disgusting, rotten tiny wee (for a while anyway) green camouflaged bugs. You nearly can't see them. But squash, squash, squash. Once you're happy you've got the eggs and caterpillars off your leaves, cover with some form of netting (old orange and onion bags are good). These little buggers nearly wiped out my growing challenge womboks. Lisa x

Ah yep, I was going to suggest cabbage moth also, don't you hate the little buggers?!

I do recognise your mystery plant too, but no idea what the name is sorry! I just googled a couple of names that popped into my mind, but it isn't them - but I'm pretty sure it isn't a weed, LOL. If I'm right, it's a pretty little ground-cover. Cheers, Julie

I've got something like this as well on my broccoli. They started to show just as I saw my tiny head of broccoli coming up. Then they ate ALLL of the leaves. Every last leaffy part and left nothing by the tough thick veins. I would hate to have to do this for a whole field of broccoli. Is there another option? How to organic large farms do it? Do they really hire someone to pick off every bug?

Organic means very little. they are still allowed to use pesticides, they just have to follow certain loosly defined FDA regulations. Organic doesn't mean good, clean, or natural (note that the word natural has no definition by the FDA. "Natural" means nothing on product packaging. My use of the word natural here is used to mean unmodified by the effects of any man-made substance other than compost)